Databases are an integral part of Information Technology (IT) infrastructure. Business-critical IT systems must offer the highest availability, ensure fast and easy access to data, and adapt quickly to changing business demands. Many large organizations have responded to this need by migrating to an IT infrastructure that features a number of replicated databases, each positioned to respond rapidly to customer needs. The existence of a network of replicated databases, however, has focused attention on the process of database replication. Disaster Recovery (DR), High Availability (HA), Business Intelligence (BI), and even regulatory oversight require that database replication proceed seamlessly and continuously.
Increasingly, the demands of ever-increasing system availability as well as system complexity, call for evermore powerful solutions. To provide these solutions, active-active database configurations are increasingly employed. However, existing techniques of modeling active-active configurations, as well as other configurations, may not be sufficiently capable of addressing the granular details of the replication environment.
Thus, a need remains for modeling techniques that allow database managers and technicians to construct operational models of database replication systems across multiple network systems, operating environments, and database technologies.